CHAPTER 23
Herodotus and Ethnicity
Rosaria Vignolo Munson
Introduction
Today we widely recognize that the concept of “ethnicity” involves juggling compet-
ing fictions (Barth 1969, Murray 2002). In my part of Europe, and at the time when
I was growing up, no group membership counted except the family and the state as
a territorial and political unit. Italy is a nation that was for centuries colonized, over-
run, or conquered by every group imaginable, a country composed of communities that
were mutually autonomous until less than 150 years ago and are now rival cities and
regions—not to mention the major North and South cultural clash. There, nevertheless,
the essentialist fiction lives on that all Italians are the same, white, from an Italian-speaking
parentage, and from a Catholic or Jewish background (Smith 1986: 61, Böckler 1997).
This causes problems in view of the increasing influx of immigrants in the last 40 years,
but, on the other hand, a serious discourse about internal ethnic subdivisions remains
suspect, and often rightly so. Conversely, in other regions of the world that have more
experience in recognizing their internal multi-ethnicity, fictions contribute to determin-
ing what counts for belonging to one group or another, or rather what counts most in
different cases. Criteria of ethnicity include blood in the literal, scientific sense; physi-
cal appearance; “blood” in the narrative sense (a history of descending from a common
ancestor); cultural traits, including language, traditions, and religion; and, finally, terri-
torial habitation and provenance (Smith 1986, McInerney 2001, Isaac 2004, as well as,
especially, the contributions by McInerney (Chapter 1) and Siapkas (Chapter 5) in this
volume). Each of these becomes, in turn, overvalued or undervalued and combine in
odd and contradictory ways.
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.